


It's Not Called Pop

by atheniavenesia



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: M/M, musician au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-23
Updated: 2017-07-23
Packaged: 2018-12-05 19:11:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11584359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atheniavenesia/pseuds/atheniavenesia
Summary: Jack's from the Midwest, for God’s sake. Nobody’s coming out of there normal. He insists on calling Gabriel ‘sir’ despite the fact that they’re the same age. He calls soda ‘pop,’ too. That one’s really bad. The most egregious fault, though, is the way that Jack seems to be aware of exactly how hot he is. It’s the tight shirts, it’s the way he tilts his head back when he thinks, it’s the way he meticulously arranges his hair to look the slightest bit disheveled every time he passes a mirror.OrHow I learned to Quit Worrying and Love the Intern





	It's Not Called Pop

Gabriel doesn’t believe in muses. That just, like, doesn’t happen in real life. He’d read all those old Greek novels back in the day; you know, the ones about seeing somebody that would make your whole world stop and the stars shine brighter and all that bullshit. It’s just not realistic.

But. And there’s always a but.

Jack does give him ideas. He’s utterly weird, of course. Gabriel tries not to hold that against him, though. He’s from the Midwest, for God’s sake. Nobody’s coming out of there normal. He insists on calling Gabriel ‘sir’ despite the fact that they’re the same age. He calls soda ‘pop,’ too. That one’s really bad. The most egregious fault, though, is the way that Jack seems to be aware of exactly how hot he is. It’s the tight shirts, it’s the way he tilts his head back when he thinks, it’s the way he meticulously arranges his hair to look the slightest bit disheveled every time he passes a mirror.

All of that, however, is secondary to the fact that the sight of the man makes him want to run directly into the booth and lay down the hottest song of the last century. Not that he’s inspired by Jack. He doesn’t even like him all that much.

Honest.

Right now, for example, Jack is standing in front of him with his head cocked to the side and his phone out to take Gabriel’s order.

“Wuh?” Gabriel says.

See? He can hardly stand the man.

“What would you like to drink?” Jack repeats.

Gabe swallows. “Coffee.” Jack raises an eyebrow at him. “Sugar. Please put sugar in it, thank you and goodbye.”

Gabe turns on his heel. He doesn’t walk away. He hasn’t heard Jack leave yet, but that’s perhaps not his most pressing issue right now. What he’s most concerned about is the way that his face is absolutely luminescent right now and how Jack most assuredly saw him blush at being asked his coffee order. Like a teenager.

“Alright,” Jack says. Gabriel can hear him smirking. Hear it! “I’ll be right back with that, sir.”

Gabe nods. He does not, however, turn around. He instead waits to hear the sound of the studio’s door closing behind Jack before he brings his hands up to cover his face.

“That wasn’t so bad,” Ana says. Gabe looks at her from between a gap in his fingers. She’s sitting at the mixing desk. “Well,” she amends, “I think it could have gone worse.”

“How?” Gabe croaks.

She bites her bottom lip and goes quiet for a moment.

“I don’t actually know,” she admits. “You’re very bad at that.”

Gabe groans. “How long until he’s gone?”

“The label gave him the job for the summer, so”—she checks her phone—“another six weeks.”

His shoulders slump. He can see Jack downstairs now, flirting with the barista. He doesn’t even need anything from the man, all their coffee is gratis from label. He’s just doing to because he can!

“He’s going to kill me,” Gabriel says. He pulls his hands away from his face. “How am I supposed to work like this?”

He’s starting to work himself up into a state. He starts pacing.

Ana looks at him again, this time with one eyebrow cocked. “The same as always?”

“You’re wildly bad at giving advice.”

“Good thing I don’t get paid to give advice,” she says. “And speaking of money: would it kill you to get into the booth and give me something to produce? Some of us are going crazy sitting on their hands.”

“But I don’t have anything to record,” he replies. “That’s kind of an important part of being a musician, I’m not sure if you’ve heard.”

Ana looks at him with widened eyes. She points at the notebook sitting on the table.

“What about that notebook full of lyrics that you said would be the ‘next big thing in music’ a month ago?”

Gabe waves her off. “It would have been the next big thing. Last month. Things change, Ana. We’re constantly changing tapestries of the events we experience.”

She leans her elbows on the mixing table. She cards her fingers through her dark hair. “I’m going to kill you myself, Gabriel Reyes.”

“Ana, I know these things,” he says.

He notes that he’s still pacing and moves to lean against the wall of the studio. Just to his left is the platinum record he’d gotten from Death Blossom, his debut work. It’s his only album, actually. But it was really good, if he does say so himself. Besides, it’s only a year old. Jesus, it’s already been a year. He blames the sudden sheen of sweat on the malfunctioning air conditioner.

“You don’t know anything, actually,” she says. “Let a man get a Grammy and he thinks he knows everything.”

Gabe snaps his fingers. “Oh, yeah! I’m a Grammy winner, doesn’t that mean I’m good at the this?”

Ana places her hands on the mixing table and takes a deep breath. “I’m a Grammy winner, too. Twice, in fact. So I’m twice as good as you. And do you know what those Grammys said to me this morning when I booked the studio for us?”

Gabe knows this is going to end badly for him. “… no?”

Ana stands up. “They told me that if I didn’t have song by the time I went home today, they were going to find you and burn your apartment to the ground.”

She’s looking to the ground, her hair falling in front of her face. All he can see of her is the line of her shoulders as she inhales.

He speaks. “I don’t know how you could burn down just my apartment. It’s part of a build—”

She shouts wordlessly and spins to face him fully. “Get. In. The. Booth.”

“But—”

“Now!”

She takes two large steps to the table that has his notebook sitting atop it and picks it up. In the same movement, she lobs it at him. He just manages to catch it. Ana is right behind it. She spins him around and starts pushing him into the booth.

“Hey! Wait, wait, wait!”

Unfortunately, she does not ‘wait, wait, wait.’ The door clicks behind him. The light is provided by panels in the ceiling. It gives him the impression of floating in the sun. He’s now got a stool, keyboard, and microphone. Not very good. He turns to face the window that dominates one side of the booth. It gives him an almost unfettered view of the rest of the studio.

Ana is sitting in her chair, rubbing at her temples. As if she can sense his eyes on her, she looks up.

“I’m not going to do anything,” he says as he folds his arms across his chest.

She continues to stare at him blankly. He repeats himself. She taps her ear, mouths something at him. ‘Soundproofing.’ Gabe’s mouth is hanging open. To add (another) insult to injury, she sticks her tongue out at him.

“Seriously?” he says aloud. “Are you really doing this?”

She does it again, this time pulling at the bottom of one eye. Her eye of Horus tattoo there stretches with the movement. Gabe crosses his arms. She is undeterred in her efforts. He taps his foot on the ground. She holds the position. He doesn’t even think she blinks.

Finally, “Whatever, two can play at this game.”

He pulls the same face. Better, even. Ana stops immediately and leans back in her chair. Her mouth is open. She’s… laughing? Gabe sees movement. Jack is in the room.

Jack has the coffee.

Jack is laughing.

Gabe could comfortably die this very instant. He crouches and places his head between his knees. He’s going to kill… somebody. Definitely. He doesn’t know who yet. He hears a click.

“Well, if you’re done with that,” Ana’s voice comes filtered through the speakers in the room, “I’d like to get a chance to hear that song you were bragging about earlier.”

She doesn’t sound like somebody that’s gone as far towards torture as the Geneva Conventions would allow. She sounds like an interested producer. Evil, evil woman. He opens his mouth to reply, but the click comes again.

“Jack’s also very excited to hear what you’ve written.”

His mouth, poised with an incredibly cutting remark, hangs open. Jack grins. It has no business looking as innocent as it does. He saunters up to the microphone. He saunters everywhere, of course, but this sauntering is particularly noteworthy. He puts a hand on Ana’s shoulder and leans towards the mic. He licks his lips before speaking.

“Absolutely,” he says. He looks to Ana for a moment before looking back to Gabe. His bites at his cheek. “I’d love to watch your process.”

Gabriel hates him. Both of them. He’s quitting music. He’s actually gearing up to tell them that he’s no longer in the business, actually, and he hopes they have fun with whoever Overwatch Records decides to replace him with, but there’s mutiny on the SS Gabriel because his body decides on its own to say, “I’ll see what I can do.”

His heart is in his throat. It deserves to be in orbit for what it just allowed to happen. He swallows. He needs to leave right now. Actually, he needs to leave, build a time machine, and go back to he first grade so he can destroy the keyboard he’d gotten for his birthday. But first, he looks back to the window. Ana has her brows somewhere near her hairline. Jack, too. Which is the first time Gabe has seen him look anything other than confident. It makes him look even better. This sucks.

Gabe takes a deep breath. It’ll be fine. He’ll play some scales and hum a few bars. If he manages that, he can say that it’s just not happening today. Then he can leave. He wonders if his album made enough money to justify firing the both of them.

He turns and sits on the stool. “Okay,” he says.

Ana has her brows furrowed like she’s amazed this is working. Gabe can sympathize. He reaches out a hand and runs his fingers across the keyboard. He takes a deep breath.  
He sits down and pulls the headphones over his ears. The stool’s hard edges dig into his butt, but he tries not to wiggle. It’s not a very successful effort. He pointedly doesn’t look at the half-grin on Jack’s face. He takes a breath.

“Ready?” he asks into the mic.

Ana her own headphones pulled over her ears. She nods and gives him a thumbs up. He inhales, then stops when he sees Jack’s mouth open. Whatever he says gets Ana digging beneath her desk with fervor. Gabe lets the air out of his lungs with a wheeze. Ana reappears with another pair of headphones clasped in her hands. Gabe taps on the keyboard. A few discordant notes fall out.

“Ana, you’re a traitor,” Gabe says. “Judas.”

Jack’s headphones are still unplugged, so he can get away with airing his thoughts out for a moment longer. Jack’s eyes are intent on the way Ana searches for a headphone jack, so he’s even free to look as upset as he’d like. And he does take full advantage of it. Ana pauses for a moment to narrow her eyes at him. Then Jack’s headphones are plugged in and Gabe has to return to acting like he’s not trying to teleport into the molten core of the earth.

Click. “Whenever you’re ready,” Ana says.

Gabe exhales again. He does a warm up on the keyboard, his fingers dancing over the plastic keys.

Click. “Don’t you need to see your notebook?” Jack asks.

Jack is grinning at him. Gabe is going to tunnel his way out of this booth with his headphones to kill him.

“Thanks for the heads-up,” Gabe replies.

He leafs open his notebook and skims over what he has written.

Bad.

Bad.

Stupid.

Bad.

Oh, my god, pretentious.

He’s ready to throw the notebook at the window and make his great escape when he sees a song. A good song. A really good song… titled ‘John.’ Gabe is going to vomit. He looks up once more and sees that Ana is looking at him with her arms crossed over her chest. He doesn’t even bother looking at Jack. As far as Gabe’s concerned, there is nothing but a man-shaped void at Ana’s side. A void with really nice shoulders.

Ugh.

He scans the lyrics. No names, he sees. He remembers writing this in his apartment at 4AM with his keyboard across his lap and all the lights on. His fingers twitch. He doesn’t even need to check the notation, that’s how vivid the phantom melody is. He clears his throat. He does some scales. Maybe as their final act of mercy, Ana and Jack don’t chime in with another barb. Though that does leave him with the reality that he’s about to perform a love song to somebody he hasn’t been able to speak a coherent sentence to in the month and a half they’ve worked together.

He’s got this.

Inhale.

Exhale.

Inhale.

…

Exhale?

Gabe becomes aware of himself all at once. His mind feels like it’s come to a jarring stop, and he has to take a moment to reorient himself. He’d been breathing, then he’d touched the keyboard, then he’d—

He done the song.

He pulls his hands back from the keyboard like he’s been burned. And for all he knows, he might have been. After all, he’s entering fugue states while recording, so anything is possible now. He doesn’t have the slightest idea of how that had looked to Ana and Jack.

Wait.

Ana and Jack.

He looks up from his keyboard. He debates playing a horror movie riff. That might be a bit too dramatic. Not too unfitting, though. When he finally fixes his eyes on them, though, it’s not half as horrifying as he’d expected. Ana has her eyes fixed on her mixing equipment with her brows furrowed and hands at a standstill as they hover above it. Jack has nothing to fix his gaze on that isn’t Gabe, and he doesn’t bother hiding it. His eyes are locked onto Gabe with his lips slightly parted and a shimmer on his cheek.

Hold on, what is that? He’s got it on both cheeks, on second glance. Gabe squints. He’s crying? What the fuck just happened? Gabe gets up from his stool. That snaps Ana and Jack from their trance. Ana reaches for a knob on her board, already working. Jack swipes at his face hurriedly. Even with one hand twiddling and turning, Ana still manages to press the button to patch their voices in. There is no turn-taking this time.

“The Grammys were right—”

“I’m so sorry—”

“—Mama’s getting paid—”

“—Sir, I just don’t know what came over me—”

“—so good, Gabe—”

“—just love you so much!”

The voices cut off abruptly. Gabe’s head is spinning. There was something important in all of that. Jack seems to think so, too. His face is red. Jesus, he’s crimson. Now that Gabe thinks about it, this is the first time he’s seen Jack blush. It looks like it goes all the way down his chest. Gabe feels his mind spark at the thought of Jack’s chest. Ana looks like her mind comes to brief halt, too. His thoughts must be catching. Her mind, though, manage to kick over and get going once more. She looks… happy. Her fingers are still dancing over the controls, but they slow when she leans back in her seat and laughs.

Jack sputters. Gabe’s no good at reading lips, much to his chagrin. But the body language is unmistakable: Jack looks like a schoolboy with a crush. On Gabe. Who he loves. Oh, man. Gabe brings a hand up to rub against his goatee. He should do something besides smile and rub his facial hair like a supervillain. He drops his notebook to the floor and moves to the door. He twists and it opens just like that. He remembers now that these door don’t lock. Wow, he’s not good under pressure.  
But that’s a passing thought. Everything seems like a passing thought right now, if he’s being honest. Especially when he opens the door and hears Jack’s voice high and bouncing off the walls of the studio, weaving between bursts of laughter from Ana.

“I can’t believe it, he’s going to hate me,” Jack says. “What do I do, can I be transfered, I can’t work for you anymore.”

Ana inhales for a moment, just long enough to squeeze out, “I cannot believe you two,” and then she’s laughing again, her hands finally coming to a halt on the sound mixer so she can double up in earnest.

“Jack,” Gabe says.

Jack jumps. He’s red and sweaty and his lips are chapped, which Gabe absolutely cannot believe he didn’t notice until just now.

“You like my music?” Gabe says.

Jack looks to Ana, but she’s finally managed to gather her composure enough to focus on the soundboard. His eyes dart back, only making contact for a moment. He bites at his lower lip for a moment. He looks pensive. Finally, he squares his shoulders.

“Yes, he says. His voice tremors slightly, but when he resumes, it’s even. “I really like your music.”

Gabe shakes his head. His stomach is still doing knots but his mind is able to look past it for a moment to see the play of muscle under Jack’s skin as he plays with the hem of his shirt.

“Why didn’t you say anything?” Gabe finally asks.

“I didn’t want you thinking I was just some crazy fan, sir,” Jack says. “I just”—he trails off and Jack is a nervous boy again—“your music meant a lot to me growing up in Indiana. You were so nice, too, and cool and fun. You were just… you.”

Gabe swallows. He feels like there’s too much spit in his mouth. “But you’re hot?”

Jack’s head darts up. A smile on his face. “Thank you, sir.”

Gabe feels his cheeks burning. “I mean, why not just tell me you liked me? I don’t imagine you get turned down for much.”

Jack smiles. It’s the smile Gabe knows, but not. The teeth are there, still pristine and standing at military attention, and the pink lips. But there’s more, too. It’s the way that one side takes a moment longer to rise, like he’s shy. It’s the way his eyes are pulled up from the ground, like he’s got to look into Gabe’s eyes.

“I wanted you to tell me,” he says finally. “I didn’t want to be, like, a groupie.”

Gabe’s mouth drops open. “I don’t have groupies.”

Jack’s mouth makes perfect ‘O’.

Gabe brings a hand up and rubs a thumb across his lips. “We could have been dating this whole time?”

“Uh,” Jack says.

Gabe walks to Jack in three large strides. His brows are drawn down into two harsh lines across his forehead. Can he be blamed for that, though? A month and a half of unresolved sexual tension for no reason? Jack’s lucky Gabe didn’t decide to bludgeon himself to death with his keyboard.

These thoughts, maybe, are the reason that it comes as such a surprise when he realizes he’s kissing Jack. He freezes. First kisses with new people were supposed to be romantic, or something. But that’s hard to think about with Jack’s head cradled between his hands and Jack’s blond eyelashes fluttering shut and Jack’s lips parting to let slip a moan that Gabe can swear he swallows. They need to talk, preferably sometime soon. But Jack doesn’t stop kissing, and Gabe certainly doesn’t stop kissing. And feeling Jack’s tongue like that makes his heart feel like it’s going to stop beating. He feels a feather light touch on his hip and realizes that Jack has just barely slipped his hands beneath his shirt.

“If you two are going to fuck, do it in the booth,” Ana says. “I’ll put in the album as an interlude.”

Gabe pulls back. There is a smacking sound that Gabe will deny until his deathbed makes him want to pull Jack into the booth and do just that.

“Ana, don’t — I wasn’t,” Gabe says. “Don’t be gross,” he settles on.

“I’m not the one trying to get to second base,” she says. Jack pulls his hand away and shoves it into his pocket. Gabe doesn’t know that he’ll ever forgive her for that. “Besides, it worked for Biggie.”

“I — wait, really?”

She nods sagely. “That’s neither here nor there, though.” She looks back to her soundboard. “But I’ll let you two get out of here. I’ve got what I need.”

“It’s okay, ma’am,” Jack begins. “I don’t want to just leave—”

“We’ll see you tomorrow.” Jack looks positively scandalized. Gabe grins. “We’ve got to make up for last time. I’ve got six weeks of dates to take you on tonight, Jack. We’re burning daylight.”

Jack looks a bit more at ease. “Fine, but only if we go by the cafe downstairs. I’ve been teaching the barista how to flirt.”  
Gabe snaps. “I knew it!”

Jack tilts his head. “What?”

Gabe shakes his head and slings an arm around Jack’s shoulder. “We can go wherever you want.”

Jack snorts, but his cheeks are red. “That was kind of cheesy.”

Gabe nods and starts pulling him to the door. “You got that right,” he says.

He kisses Jack on the temple and smells the fruit scent of his shampoo. That’s cheesy, too, but Jack lets it slide.

**Author's Note:**

> I was really debating making this an Explicit™ thing but I decided that it would just be better to put it out into the world instead of sitting on it for even longer. So...
> 
> ...here it is.  
> Have fun and comment and participate in your local elections.


End file.
